Dear EFT Community,
EFT practitioner, Honey Coleman, works with a client with a highly sensitive temperament which she traces back to the way her mother treated her growing up. With the help of EFT, the client becomes more accepting of her mother, free from rancor or upset.
-EFTUniverse
By Honey Coleman, Certified EFT Practitioner
I would like to tell you a story about Barbara, a client of mine, who came to me because a massage therapist told her she had some blocked energy and suggested she see someone to help with that. I had recently spoken with her over coffee after a gym class and explained my work so she called for a session.
She didn’t understand how or why EFT works but she had faith in me and trusted me to help her. I did make sure she knew I did not judge and that everything was confidential.
She was taking a daily dose of 20mg of Cipralex for anxiety for over a year and I was concerned that might affect our work. To me she felt a little distanced from her emotions, but once we started tapping, all went well.
I did notice that unlike some of my clients with whom I can work on 5 or 6 memories and several different emotions in a one hour session, with Barbara I had to slow right down and concentrate on one event, one emotion.
I make it a point in every first session with a new client to clear as much physical pain as possible and we did clear the pain in her neck and the top of her head. Tapping on the pain brought up a memory which included embarrassment, helplessness and humiliation. Using SUDs numbers to measure, we brought those numbers down to 4 or 5. As this was her first session and she was reacting with tiredness, we stopped there.
I explained about her possible reactions to the releasing of these emotions and we made an appointment for the following week.
She could see that this was working because most of the pain was gone.
In our second session I started with ‘slow EFT tapping’ which is tapping on the same point for much longer than usual until I felt intuitively that point was clear before moving on to the next point. That worked for her, perhaps as she got used to the tapping and the movement of energy as it released.
After that it all became easier. She had originally thought she could not remember her childhood but as we tapped, memories came up. We cleared many emotions including shock, frustration, resentment, anger, guilt. On her next session she said she felt a little calmer.
Over a series of 5 sessions we cleared fear, panic, worthlessness, taken for granted, I’m not worthy and many more. Then she told me she was planning to spend a long weekend with her sister and mother at a family celebration in another city.
She did not have a good relationship with either of these women who caused her pain and sorrow every time they spoke or spent time together. We had 3 sessions to prepare. We worked on the earliest memories she could find in her childhood where she was considered very different from the rest of the family. This may have been because she is a Highly Sensitive Personality. She needed more time alone and was not interested in anything the others in the family were interested in and was constantly put down for that.
We cleared many emotions from her teenage years of anger, frustration, sadness and hate, panic, stubbornness and indecision.
All the while testing each memory to make sure the emotions were completely gone.
We specifically looked at some early memories of her mother’s treatment of her. What she remembers is her mother not being interested in her or caring about her daughter’s pain. What I saw was a mother full of her own fear trying to protect her daughter from possible pain, but that wasn’t what Barbara saw.
I was looking forward to hearing about her weekend with her family. She did not disappoint me. She was overflowing with happiness and gratitude for the work we had done. She had spent long stretches of time with her sister whose every word in the past would have wounded Barbara like an arrow. This weekend none of the arrows stuck because there was nothing there to stick to. She noticed this herself over the weekend which I took as a confirmation of a cognitive shift.
Barbara also had a cognitive shift about her mother that weekend.
She realized that a lot of the actions and words that in the past hurt her and made her feel frustrated and angry, were the actions and words of an elderly woman who was just interested in herself and her own comfort. Barbara found herself accepting the extra care and work needed to look after an elderly woman on holiday away from her own home, without rancor or upset.
Barbara has been very aware of the changes in her life because of our sessions and the work she does at home between our weekly sessions. Each week she relates another story to me about a change she has noticed in her relationship with another person in her life. She now easily finds memories to tap on and no longer feels disconnected from her emotions but comfortable with them.
She is a conscientious tapper and always does the homework I suggest to her. One bit of homework I give to all my clients is a daily check for anything frustrating or irritating to be tapped on before bed, as Dawson Church suggested in his Level 1 training here in Toronto. Thank you, Dawson.
I’m very proud of Barbara and the progress she is making. We have more to do but the work is such a joy. She is feeling better in leaps and bounds and is grateful for EFT.
